Pernille Rørth received her Ph. D. in molecular biology from the University of Copenhagen (Denmark) in 1993 for thesis work done in the lab of Steven McKnight at the Carnegie Institution of Washington (USA). After four years as a staff associate at the Carnegie, she moved to the European Molecular Biology Lab in Heidelberg, Germany to take a position as a Group Leader in the Developmental Biology Program. She has been with EMBL since that time, and was appointed to Senior Scientist in 2003. She was also appointed the executive editor of the EMBO journal in 2005. Her recent work has focused on the regulation of cell migration and morphogenesis in Drosophila.